Is consuming material that's beyond your "comprehensible input" level ever BETTER than understanding what you consume?

[Severine]

When I mentioned flowers names in an earlier posting it was actually a covert reference to the notion of fuzziness, Sometimes you can live with a lot of it - like when you recognize from the context that XYZ probably is a plant, possibly a flower, but it doesn't matter which one. But in some cases it does matter whether 'horned pansy' refers to a tree or bush or a small perennial (or maybe something totally different like a gardening tool) - just as it sometimes does matter whether 'crimson' is a red or a green colour. The problem is that it is fundamentally impossible to predict how much fuzziness you are prepared to accept in a certain situation. And therefore it is idiotic to say that you have to know 98% off all words in a text to accept it as comprehensible. There is definitely a bottom level for what a reader can and will accept - at some point he/she simply can't make sense of anything and gives up. But there is a grey zone where it depends on your degree of knowledge and awareness and patience whether you see a text as 'sufficiently comprehensible'.

This is a great point and often overlooked. Some texts become considerably more accessible if you factor in the number of words you don't actually care to learn. When I read Moby Dick in the French translation, for example, there were dozens of unknown words I mentally classified as "some kind of ship part" before moving on without feeling any desire to clarify or attempt to learn them. I was completely comfortable with that, and it in no way diminished my understanding of the part of the text that mattered to me, nor my enjoyment. I am sure I would not have known half the terms in English, either, and I am not bothered by my lack of naval vocabulary in any language.

Knowing whether a given word is important to know or not is, of course, a skill in its own right. It also requires a sufficient level of understanding of the text. Yet, that is not such an impediment, in my view, at least not for most people.

[Khayyam]

When I mentioned flowers names in an earlier posting it was actually a covert reference to the notion of fuzziness, Sometimes you can live with a lot of it - like when you recognize from the context that XYZ probably is a plant, possibly a flower, but it doesn't matter which one. But in some cases it does matter whether 'horned pansy' refers to a tree or bush or a small perennial (or maybe something totally different like a gardening tool) - just as it sometimes does matter whether 'crimson' is a red or a green colour. The problem is that it is fundamentally impossible to predict how much fuzziness you are prepared to accept in a certain situation. And therefore it is idiotic to say that you have to know 98% off all words in a text to accept it as comprehensible. There is definitely a bottom level for what a reader can and will accept - at some point he/she simply can't make sense of anything and gives up. But there is a grey zone where it depends on your degree of knowledge and awareness and patience whether you see a text as 'sufficiently comprehensible'.

This is a great point and often overlooked. Some texts become considerably more accessible if you factor in the number of words you don't actually care to learn. When I read Moby Dick in the French translation, for example, there were dozens of unknown words I mentally classified as "some kind of ship part" before moving on without feeling any desire to clarify or attempt to learn them. I was completely comfortable with that, and it in no way diminished my understanding of the part of the text that mattered to me, nor my enjoyment. I am sure I would not have known half the terms in English, either, and I am not bothered by my lack of naval vocabulary in any language.

Knowing whether a given word is important to know or not is, of course, a skill in its own right. It also requires a sufficient level of understanding of the text. Yet, that is not such an impediment, in my view, at least not for most people.

This reminds me of when I reached the scene in Harry Potter with the troll in the bathroom. I think I found the troll scarier because the description of it was somewhat opaque to me. There are moments when an imperfect understanding can actually improve the experience. I remember wondering at the time if Lewis Carroll was thinking along those lines when he wrote "Jabberwocky."

[jeffers]

The problem is that it is fundamentally impossible to predict how much fuzziness you are prepared to accept in a certain situation. And therefore it is idiotic to say that you have to know 98% off all words in a text to accept it as comprehensible. There is definitely a bottom level for what a reader can and will accept - at some point he/she simply can't make sense of anything and gives up. But there is a grey zone where it depends on your degree of knowledge and awareness and patience whether you see a text as 'sufficiently comprehensible'.

It's not idiotic, it's statistics, which are themselves fuzzy. There is no single book for which the 98% coverage is intended, it is a statistical average based on the idea that if you have to stop and look up a word every 3-4 lines of text you are breaking your flow.

Personally, I like using a Kindle to read because I can then do quick lookups every 3-4 lines without really breaking my flow of reading, but it is still much more pleasant to read when I can reduce my lookups to 1-2 per page. (I also like reading on a Kindle because I can make the font large and don't need my reading glasses! )

[Cainntear]

I think the main thing here is that CI is defined as something you can understand without looking anything up. Anything where you have to look things up isn't CI, and the Krashen line is that this falls into learning about language rather than straight up learning language (he uses the distinction of "learning" vs "acquisition", but that just seems arbitrary semantics to me, and most of the SLA world doesn't make that distinction.)

Whilst it seems fair to state: "CI is something you can understand without looking anything up", the following statement "Anything where you have to look things up isn't CI", is to my mind a reductive false syllogism. This is not really what Krashen said.

I say this because what it boils down to in a real-life scenario is a decision: about whether or not you will make some investigation into the fuzzy edges.

Well this kind of hits my major issue with Krashen -- he said things that sound very clear and definitive, but are in fact very fuzzy indeed. This leaves a lot of teachers actually fighting over what he was saying.

Like his acquisition-learning distinction says that learning never turns to acquisition.

Teacher 1: Krashen says that looking up a dictionary never leads to acquiring a word. Dictionaries are useless.
Teacher 2: Nonono. Krashen says that anything that doesn't make a text comprehensible is useless. Dictionaries can be used to make a text more comprehensible. It's only grammar rules that are useless.
Teacher 1: Nonono. That's learning, not acquisition.
Teacher 2: Nonono. It may seem like learning, but that would only be the case if you stopped after reading the dictionary. It's making the text comprehensible so that you have comprehensible input you can acquire from.
Teacher 3: Ah, but if I present a grammar rule that's going to appear in the lesson text, that makes the text more comprehensible, so it's OK, right?
Teacher 1: No -- looking up stuff is learning, not acquisition.
Teacher 2: No -- looking up words makes input comprehensible; looking up grammar rules doesn't -- that's still learning.
etc
etc
ad nauseum.

The thing is, you can reductio ad absurdum the whole thing, because doing a bunch of grammar exercises beforehand makes pretty much every text more comprehensible.

It is usually the case that when reading or listening one might not grasp every single thing and this is the case for anything capable of being understood; including information in our own native languages. If you sit through a lecture and then go and read up on what was addressed it wouldn't be because it was 'incomprehensible', but the pursuit of total comprehension. You might choose not to read or look up anything and still 'comprehend' to an effective level what was put forward in the lecture. Some of your understanding involved more than just the 'meaning' and structure of the words delivered.

As you know I am no Krashen superfan (and I think his approach to what output actually does in language acquisition is very misguided), but here is what he actually says about input:

We acquire, in other words, only when we understand language that contains structure that is "a little beyond" where we are now. How is this possible? How can we understand language that contains structures that we have not yet acquired? The answer to this apparent paradox is that we use more than our linguistic competence to help us understand. We also use context, our knowledge of the world, our extra-linguistic information to help us understand language directed at us...

Principles & Practise, 1982

This involves grasping 'meaning' over pure 'structure'. So in essence ALL CI is beyond a person's 'level' in many respects. All reading and listening and communication is a process of meaning and contextual comprehension.

This is all well and good, but throughout the thread, the word level seems to be continuing the usage of the term as used be Khayyam in the thread title: "comprehensible input" level -- text at a level where it contains some new language to be acquired and not so much that you get stuck in a dictionary or grammar book. One of the concepts being explored in parts of this thread is what that level actually is.

[emk]

Teacher 1: Krashen says that looking up a dictionary never leads to acquiring a word. Dictionaries are useless.
Teacher 2: Nonono. Krashen says that anything that doesn't make a text comprehensible is useless. Dictionaries can be used to make a text more comprehensible. It's only grammar rules that are useless.
Teacher 1: Nonono. That's learning, not acquisition.
Teacher 2: Nonono. It may seem like learning, but that would only be the case if you stopped after reading the dictionary. It's making the text comprehensible so that you have comprehensible input you can acquire from.
Teacher 3: Ah, but if I present a grammar rule that's going to appear in the lesson text, that makes the text more comprehensible, so it's OK, right?

In the other thread, I argued that there's a continuum from "inspirational teacher" to "official movement" to "bureaucratically-mandated practice." By the time teachers 1, 2 and 3 are having that discussion, you've already fallen pretty far down the continuum. Here are some much better questions the teachers could be arguing about:

1. "Should we have a library of level-appropriate books and media about varied and interesting topics?"
2. "Should we strongly encourage students to read more books and watch more TV series?"
3. "Johnny has read lots of books and watched lots of TV series, and he does well on comprehension tests. But his speaking skills are far below average. Should we try to get Johnny more conversation practice? Should we make him write more? Or should we give him more books and TV series?"

These are concrete questions about how to teach students, not arguments over the difference between "acquisition" and "learning." I believe that one of Krashen's biggest contributions was arguing that (1) and (2) were good policy. I also believe that one of Krashen's biggest failures was encouraging people in the educational system to downplay question (3), or even to give Johnny bad advice.

This is all well and good, but throughout the thread, the word level seems to be continuing the usage of the term as used be Khayyam in the thread title: "comprehensible input" level -- text at a level where it contains some new language to be acquired and not so much that you get stuck in a dictionary or grammar book. One of the concepts being explored in parts of this thread is what that level actually is.

I think there are three interesting levels here:

1. What's the lowest level of comprehension that typical students will tolerate? This is where I hear people using numbers like "98%". Apparently the average student wants a very high level of comprehension before they want to read?
2. What's the lowest level of comprehension where you can usefully do extensive reading without looking much up? I suspect this is much lower than 98%. As I mentioned, I got quite good results starting a Super Challenge with 70% comprehensible/30% mostly guessable/10% opaque reading. And I've gone even lower with TV series.
3. What's the lowest level of comprehension where intensive study works? I would guess this is more a matter of the dictionaries and grammars you have available, and the difficulty of the language. There's a classic Old Norse textbook from the 40s that starts at zero, with nothing more than a grammar, a glossary, and a couple of dozen pages of bilingual text. This is made especially difficult by i-umlaut and u-umlaut shifts in the stems of words when conjugating or declining them, combined with assimilation of final stem consonants. This means that a huge number of lexical forms cannot be easily found in the glossary. But assuming you have better resources than this, there's really no lower comprehension limit for intensive study.

[jackb]

It's not idiotic, it's statistics, which are themselves fuzzy. There is no single book for which the 98% coverage is intended, it is a statistical average based on the idea that if you have to stop and look up a word every 3-4 lines of text you are breaking your flow.

I read the 'idiotic' part Iverson's post to be referring to the fact that you have to know all of these statistics before you actually read the book. How are you supposed to do that before you read it?

I think the compelling part of comprehensible input is more important than the % of comprehensibility of material. Actually, the more compelling it is to you, the less comprehensible it needs to be.

[leosmith]

Based on my experience with German, and now with Persian, I'm of the opinion that there is likely never a time when consuming material that's beyond my "comprehensible input" level (like letting a radio show play when I can only understand 10% of the words) is a smarter approach than focusing on a much smaller bit of material and really learning it.

Maybe I've missed something here having only read your OP, but since you never mention translation it sounds like you are relying on repetition only to learn, and this is extremely ineffective ime. If I re-read material many times, after two times, with few exceptions, my improvement stops.

On the other hand, if I read it using a reading tool, even just quickly noting L1 definitions when I don't know a word/phrase, I get a lot out of it. I can then read it without the tool and understand it significantly better. Huge improvement. The same holds for any reading method where translation is allowed. Stopping and looking up each word in a paper dictionary and writing crib notes, memorizing wordlists, creating anki decks, all such methods really increase my comprehension. Repetition without translation does very little in comparison.

I'll take it a step further and say I get more out of reading a passage twice, where I only know 10% of the vocabulary, using a reading tool than I get out of reading a passage several times, where I know 90% of the vocabulary, using no translation.

[tastyonions]

But assuming you have better resources than this, there's really no lower comprehension limit for intensive study.

I'm reminded of a discussion from a while ago: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... art=10#top

Yeah but you’d still need some kind of learning resources to bring you up to the level where you’d be dining on Molière, Hugo, and Flaubert. Unless our hypothetical learner really just sits down at A0 and brute forces French literature classics with a dictionary and a grammar cheat sheet. Now that would be a terrifying level of commitment if someone were to pull that off.

I saw someone do this with Russian once. It was astonishing how fast she learned.

[iguanamon]

Krashen is irrelevant to me. None of the books I have read in any of my languages; or series I have watched; or podcasts I have listened to, ever came with a CEFR level reference.

I can't tell you what exact level I had reached when I started to dive into native material. My experience has shown me that I have to challenge myself, that I will never read easily until I just do it. I accept that it will not be easy, that I will be frustrated, that it will not be easy at first.

With Catalan, I didn't have a pop-up dictionary. I read pdf's of books on my tablet. I had three Catalan dictionaries loaded. I learned how to search words quickly. I made notes on the pdf's. After several books, look-ups became fewer and fewer.

I started watching Catalan series with and without L2 subtitles, dubbed and original. I suffered at first. It got better. I started with "Wild Kratts" an animated kids series about animals, and "Plats Bruts" the Catalan equivalent of "Friends". It wasn't easy at all, but it got better as I kept going.

At any given time in this process I could have groused and complained. I could have given up and quit. I didn't. I persevered.

There seems to be a certain train of thought that being challenged leads to giving up. It doesn't have to be that way. I know that working through my difficulties is a necessary part of moving forward. I learned this through personal experience- not Krashen, not Professor A, not any second language acquisition theory. I just do it, rightly or wrongly, and it has worked well for me over the years. I summed it up in my "multi-track approach" post. Start small and work your way up. Cheat. Cheat often. Cheat brazenly. Use parallel texts. Look up words. Do what you have to do.

[Iversen]

It's not idiotic, it's statistics, which are themselves fuzzy.

It's idiotic to say that you always need to know 98% af the words in a text to feel comfortable reading it - even if there is a survey that says that some random group of readers needed to know 98% of the words (or word families) in some sample text to feel comfortable. It's wrong to use that figure in fuzzy situations where it isn't suitable - like for instance if you read Moby Dick and don't care about the names of all the bits and pieces of an old wooden ship with sails and all that stuff. And what is really relevant vocabulary - should you count inflectional forms or headwords. Should you count each occurrence separately? Do you include poems with known words, but put together in an odd way? And how did you choose your test persons? There are so many choices behind the way you do your statistics that they are useless without some kind of explanation. I faintly remember that Nation counted word families, but the essential grammar words are probably the same ones in 100 pages and in 10.000 pages - and then you can debate how much you really need to know of of the rest.

That doesn't make statistics irrelevant. I have seen some books advertised as using a certain number of (head)words, and that's definitely a useful yardstick, but this is a figure where you know exactly what is counted, and it doesn't depend on your current mood or distance to a suitable dictionary weighing less than a kilogram. Jackb read the 'idiotic' part of my as referring to the claim that you have to know all of these statistics before you actually read the book. Well, if you are uncertain of your level then you can try a number of books out (including 'easy readers') - then you don't need to know any statistics.

That being said: I find Paul Nations research very relevant, but on a meta-something-linguistics level which you can't use to choose your own reading stuff.

PS: I really enjoyed Cainntear's fly-on-the-wall rendering of a discussion between three confused teachers.